GIVE ME THE BASICS....
Prosperity Now! A 12-Week Journey to the Life of Your Dreams is NOT a way to “magically manifest more money.” It is the way to a fuller, richer, happier, more successful life that allows you — and everyone around you — to see the unlimited joy, love, peace and possibilities that are available to each and everyone of us, Now! Not tomorrow or in some distant future, but here and now! Right there where you are, reading this.
YEAH RIGHT! SOUNDS GOOD ON PAPER. BUT.... HAVE YOU LOOKED AROUND LATELY? HAVE YOU LOOKED AT THE STATE OF THE WORLD?
Yes, I have. And it appears dire. Yet, think about it. When has it NOT appeared dire!?
Our minds play a dirty trick on us. We generally see the past through a misty lens of nostalgia, and see the future through a filter of fear. And we focus on those two things and miss the possibilities of today.
The world in the past — seen clearly — has ALWAYS been a rocky road, with many terrors and uncertainties. Few people alive today can remember or visualize the abject fear generated by the Cuban Missile crisis, when people in the United States were certain nuclear war was going to happen any second. In 1942, people in France, England and the US had no idea they would win the Second World War. Their uncertainty was immense.
Black Plague, 1929 Stock Market Crash, Watergate, British occupation of India, apartheid in South Africa, famine, pestilence, war, etc. — You can take this trip back through history and you will see that every generation dealt with fear, lack, poverty, uncertainty, war, disease, insufficiency and more....
My point is, the world not only survived, but the darkness cleared. Life moved on, and in fact got better, not jus after these horrors, but because of them! These tragedies and difficulties, the appearance of these “bogeymen” — it is just that — the appearance. They are not the REALITY in Spirit.
In “Prosperity Now!” one of the first things we re-train our minds to do is to look past appearances,” to the reality of any situation. We learn to “see it right” and then we can act from a place of power, of confidence, of assurance we will be alright and everything will be alright — despite any outward appearances.
SO YOU’RE SAYING THAT MY DIFFICULTIES AREN’T REAL? MY ILLNESS, MY JOB LOSS, MY DIVORCE AREN’T EVEN IMPORTANT.
SEEMS PRETTY DISMISSIVE. SEEMS LIKE YOU’RE TRIVIALIZING PEOPLE’S PAIN!
Not at all! The dilemmas, the pain, the hard and sad events of life are real enough. I call it “Spiritual Malpractice” to invalidate someone’s experiences, or to minimize whatever they are feeling. The “New Age” habit of telling people to “prayer harder” or “think only positive thoughts” or worse — “You must be doing something to cause this....” is not only wrong, it engenders MORE fear and pain.
My goal is to lessen fear and pain by giving people an alternative way of seeing these things. One of my sayings is, “Respect the illusion, but know the Truth.” We live in a physical world and it, to all appearances is real. Yet quantum physicists today are discovering the insubstantial nature of physical reality, and the ability of consciousness to alter and affect the quantum world.
From Chapter 1 of my book, “Prosperity Now”:
Crash and Burn
Alistair Hardy, a marine biologist who wrote The Spiritual Nature of Man and who founded the Religious Experience Research Center, studied thousands of people who had mystical experiences, shifts in consciousness, and/or deepening faith and beliefs. He found that well over 80 percent of them came to their awakening via a “crash and burn” experience: a major or a series of major life catastrophe(s).
Their life strategies failed them. Their most cherished beliefs were proven to be hollow. Their reliance on a spouse, business, their bodies, or society let them down hard.
When life (which is consciousness) leads us down dead-end paths, when our plans don’t pan out, when a marriage fails, when illness comes, when a job becomes a trap, when we hit a crisis—we are given a great gift in the midst of tragedy or calamity or when we are stuck in the doldrums of life....
We have an opportunity to throw away the old to make room for the new!
That is surrender. Put down your rusty, tired armor; let down your defenses. Join the winning side. Often, only a Gift of Desperation (G.O.D.) will motivate us to make radical changes and accept new ideas.
Before we hit the wall, we may believe our thinking is okay, even great. We may not recognize how miserable we really are. We may be satisfied with crumbs, thinking we’re getting cake.
We hit bottom, and we admit that maybe, just maybe, we are part of the problem. Our decisions based on our thinking got us to where we are right now. At least in part.
And we are ready for change! So, we surrender. We admit that our thinking causes our circumstances.
What is needed then is action. We need to learn practical ways that train our mind to turn away from old, limiting thoughts and toward a higher level of thinking, which we can, in fact, learn, practice, and develop.
As I said, we often come to surrender through crisis. A twelve-step sponsor of mine, Jim E., once told me, “Just when I thought my life was falling apart, that was when it was really all coming together.”
You see, the appearance that everything is going to hell is scary...and sad. The marriage is over; the job is over; the health crisis seems insurmountable; the kids are in trouble; the dog died; the house is in foreclosure, etc., etc.
That’s only appearance!
Turning away from what meets the eye and looking at life with an inward, spiritual eye, we will see a bigger picture. A truer picture.
Like Kris Kristofferson wrote, and Janis Joplin sang, Freedom is having nothing left to lose. Ain’t that the truth? Seeing things correctly means freedom from troubles, fears, and worries.
When all seems lost, we can choose to sink into despair and depression. Or we can look past appearances with new eyes. We will find that we are free, unencumbered. The world and our lives are a clean slate on which to write.
The whole point of Prosperity Now! is to give people a new perspective to see their current situation. If they are experiencing something they do not like — uncomfortable, scary, life-threatening, sad or worse — whatever is not joyful and filled with enthusiasm, they can “see their way out“ of the situation!
Our job is not to “set things right,” but to “see things right!” Once we do, the door that seemed closed is open. The room that was dark, suddenly is filled with light. The hopeless situation becomes — not a trap where we are powerless, but a springboard to new adventures, powerful actions, indescribable freedom.
SOUNDS LIKE A FAIRY TALE
Yes, it can sound like that from one side of the line, but step over onto the other side and see things from a 180° new perspective. A Course in Miracles defines a miracle as nothing more than a shift in perspective. Seeing things rightly means surrendering to the old, ineffective ways the world sees things, and seeing a sticky situation with new eyes. I give many examples from my own life, and from the lives of others, that demonstrate the reality of this Truth:
When we look past appearances, we can see things that happened to us as a part of a larger picture, and we can make choices based on possibilities and our deep connection to the Innate Wisdom that resides inside each and every one of us. We do not need to suffer one second longer. We can welcome any turn of events as an opportunity to grow, to wake up, to practice and to overcome! We can have it all, despite appearances!
This is true mastery — seeing past the appearance, surrendering to the illusion of fear and then seeing it right and taking action to turn tragedy into triumph!!
We all deserve, “The Life of Our Dreams!”
John
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